Netflix prize has come to a dramatic end

The Netflix Grand Prize challenge has come to an end and it was a real race to the finish. It looked like the award was going to go to the team of BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos. Yet in a surprise, and perhaps very cunning move, a new team emerged known as The Ensemble.

There is already a lot of buzz about the finish of the competition. Perhaps the first to talk of the finish was in the Operations Research blog-sphere with Sebastian Pokutta's blog. Sebastian did a great job of alerting the final days activities and keeping us up to date.

Among other places on the web include Slashdot's netflix update story. Techcrunch also submitted an article about the final push to the end of the netflix grand prize.

All in all I think this is great exposure to mathematics decision analysis, operations research, and machine learning. Regardless of your thoughts of the outcome I would have to give Netflix a lot of credit for hosting this competition and promoting it publically.